Anton Chekhov, a doctor, once said, “My holy of holies is the human body.” And the people in his plays, contrary to the way they’re often viewed, do have bodies. These are humans, in each other’s company, in a place. They’re also humans in our company, in a room with us. What Chekhov interpreters make of the much-neglected bodies is, to a great degree, what they make of the plays.
In the past weeks I’ve seen three major regional productions of The Cherry Orchard: at Cleveland’s Great Lakes Theater Festival, at American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., and at Indiana Repertory Theatre in Indianapolis. They seem to be three completely different plays.
OFF WE GO, IN SEARCH OF THE CHEKHOV EXPERIENCE.
Great Lakes mounts its version, directed by Gerald Freedman with set design by John Ezell, in the Ohio Theatre, a vast, ornate, grandly old-fashioned cavern in a lavish three-theatre complex among Cleveland’s downtown business towers. There’s lots and lots of space, in the house and on the stage, that great, gilded temple of a proscenium stage. As the company’s mission statement attests, this is truly a shrine, a monument, a place for “cultural preservation,” a haven for “classic drama.”
For the interior scenes at the Ranyevskaya estate, period furniture is set about the stage without walls to contain it. In the first act – Madame Ranyevskaya’s return from Pans and Lopakhins revelation of the estate’s jeopardy – you can see past free-standing doors right to the back of the space, where an enormous, thick cascade of bright pink blossoms shoots up and across the ceiling to loom, a magnificent oppressive, independent canopy over the action below. As the orchard’s sale impends and the scene moves outside to the surrounding estate land, blossoms rain down suddenly, apocalyptically, and leave menacing, skeletal branches to claw the firmament, while insistent telephone poles sprout from a barren, rocky landscape.
Back inside for Ranyevskaya’s defiant party, the furniture returns,” beset by a luxuriant curtain in a stage-center arch, everything aglow with the rich, heavy hues of mourning -in-advance. Of course, for the final act, once the estate is sold to Lopakhin, things get covered in sheets as everyone leaves. To the side of each interior scene, small, slightly distorted rooms sit aloft and vacant, “memories” of the home as it used to be, their lines of perspective challenging those of the inhabited space.
Things that aren’t supposed to move, such as absent-but-suggested walls, doors and large, dense pieces of furniture – the house itself – move easily, carelessly, as if they were windblown scraps, while the mobile stuff – the people – stay put, mired in sorrow, bewildered by the unexpected ephemeral” world around them. All of this, framed and distant from the crowd, is glorious, awesome, classical tragic, Important.
Nothing could differ more from the atmosphere of the Festival’s lakeside palace than the Loeb Drama Center in studious Harvard Square, where, on American Rep’s mainstage, The Cherry Orchard is no less important for its being decidedly modern. The theatre is a spacious lecture hall whose seats dive at a severe confrontational rake to the lip of a big, bare proscenium cube. It’s an unadorned room in an unadorned academic building, and George Tsypin’s set is just as stark. The estate house is represented by two dimensional, featureless cut-out walls toward the back of the stage with cut-out doorless doorways. On stage the furniture is scattered widely, all of it painted in bright solid colors, some of it – such as the crippled, screaming-yellow bookcase – at odd angles or of useless proportions. None of this decor suggests a period or place, but an idea, a hybrid of Van Gogh’s The Bedroom and a child’s sidewalk chalk-drawing.
To evoke the out-of-doors world, the stage is stripped bare, save a small backless bench and an enormous dark pole that stretches all the way to the ceiling. Across the entire rear wall hangs a Rothko-like horizon, bars of grey and brown. The orchard is revealed from behind a scrim: a row of vertically aligned fluorescent tubes. The floor, that glacial gray expanse, looks clean enough to eat off.
Almost always separated from each other across yards and yards of bleak and alien terrain the people spin in their own follow orbits, their isolation enhanced and sealed by follow-spots, their angst-frozen gazes scarcely ever meeting. Remote (from us and each other) and static, they look like pieces in an abstract sculpture garden, components of a stunning installation. Under Ron Daniels’s direction, the play becomes an incisive lecture in existential philosophy, an academic literalization of its latent lonely heart.
By contrast yet again, Indiana Reys relatively small, unspectacular house wraps around and cozies up to its apron stage. Every seat aims at the center of the stage, and the center of the stage speaks to every seat. Simon Pastukh’s set, behind the exposed outward-reaching and sparsely furnished lobe, uses a series of scrims hung with small family portraits that leave unfaded spots when they’re packed away for the final departure. Doorways aren’t aligned with each other, so that entering and leaving sends actors racing through a convoluted fun-house labyrinth. With light hitting the scrims in various ways, this set effortlessly serves as both indoor and outdoor realms.
On the floor of the stage are strewn thousands of light pink petals that whisper and lift and fly whenever people move. And people do move and move and move in an exuberant, buoyant dance, striding, tumbling, running, swirling – and everywhere they go the petals celebrate. People touch each other, grab, hug, hit, kiss, caress … they actually touch! This Cherry Orchard, directed by Libby Appel, is sensual, enthusiastic, swift, immediate, brash and near.
In the title story of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks interviews a man whose progressive neuro-psychological disorder has robbed him of the connection between seeing and feeling, made the world into a collection of pattern lifeless shapes to be deciphered. Sacks hands the man an extravagant, fresh red rose: He took it like a botanist or morphologist given a specimen, not like a person given a flower.
About six inches in length,’ he commented. “A convoluted red form with a linear green attachment.”
Yes,” I said encouragingly, “and what do you think it is, Dr. P.?”
“Not easy to say.” He seemed perplexed. “It lacks the simple symmetry of the Platonic solids, although it may have a higher symmetry of its own . . . I think this could be an inflorescence or flower.”
“Could be?’ I queried.
“Could be,” he confirmed.
“Smell it,’ I suggested, and he again looked somewhat puzzled as if I had asked him to smell a higher symmetry .But he complied courteously and took it to his nose. Now, suddenly, he came to life.
“Beautiful!” he exclaimed. “An early rose.”
Great Lakes and American Rep (their buildings unwittingly complying with each approach) displayed two brilliant higher symmetries; Indianapolis offered the rose. As tragedy or philosophy, The Cherry Orchard is sliced to but a small part of what it can be: a sensory evocation of life on earth, a thing that exists fully as what it is, not as code for something else. The play’s not Important It can matter a lot to a lot of people, but it doesn’t have some massive, weighty thing to dump in your lap. Jean-Louis Barrault once described the plot of The Cherry Orchard as follows: “Act I: The cherry orchard is in danger of being sold. Act II: The cherry orchard is going to be sold. Act III: The cherry orchard is sold. Act IV: The cherry orchard has been sold. As for the rest: life.”
The play is a living network of hungry desire. Anya – Petya; Lopakhin – Varya; Yepikhodov – Dunyasha – Yasha Ranyevskaya – life; they want one another, in the most eager and unsparing way. Richard Gilman writes that Chekhov creates a dramatic field.” Two phrase evokes a complex, nonlinear dramatic strategy, one that depends for its success on relationships among people. If the people are’nt allowed to communicate, the field breaks apart. And communication is not always the same thing as speech. That’s why it’s so vital, when characters are conceived as living beings, to bring them together, and to believe in their life. When little things can mean so much, when lips and fingers really matter, should actors be exiled from each other, divided across wide platforms – far, far away from the audience and from each other – and denied even the opportunity to move, to use their own bodies? Feelings of loneliness and loss are all the more powerful when you really attempt to connect.
But stasis and turf aren’t the only impediments to intimate human contact, Ideas, too, can be dangerous. Mark Twain, in his essay “How to Tell a Story,” advocates what he calls the “humorous story,” which he contrasts to the schematic witty story”: “The humorous story may be spun out to great length, and may wander around as much as it pleases, and arrive nowhere in particular; but the witty story must be brief and end with a point.” When you decide ahead of time that one of Chekhov’s plays aims to make a point – it’s about “tragic loss,” it’s about “isolation” – the humor disappears, the rich irrelevancies must give way to the cause, to whatever that “point” is meant to be. The thing becomes streamlined, efficient, aimed – and, ultimately, adversarial toward its audience. Chekhov’s plays certainly aren’t without something to say, but they say it like a rose reveals itself: whole. The expression on someone’s face, some specific gesture, a way of walking or talking, a teardrop or a stolen glance – these are the things that go straight to the heart, bypass the strict geometry of critical thought, communicate a total reality.
The Thesis is deadly poison to the “dramatic “field,” an inorganic invasion that wrenches our attention from the actors as people, be it a Damaclean cherry-bough suspended doomlike above, or electric “trees” that alienate-alienate-alienate, or an enormous sterile space that won’t let you forget for a second that this is Art, not life; to be admired, not experienced. When metaphor crowds out the people on stage, you’re in serious trouble-if your audience is human and your playwright writes human characters.
Indiana Rep’s evocation of The Cherry Orchard is not all smiles and light and prettiness, but it is brave and present and lusty. Behavior’s the thing. Lots of human behavior. Life loves life and wants as much as it can get. I want to experience human behavior, up close, experience humans experiencing each other. Why? Because I’m a member of the species, and because theatre makes it possible, and because Chekhov is one of the most vibrant teeming sources of human behavior ever.
George Orwell, enjoying Shakespeare’s countless loose ends, junk and trinkets and useless details, said, “he loved the surface of the earth and the process of life.” The same was true of Chekhov, who, I feel sure, would love the way his creations can, despite sorrow and failure and ugliness and death and wrong, still stride joyfully through fallen petals, unafraid of these layers of life at their feet, these playful things that bum with the pink possibility of spring and rustle with the sweet regret of autumn, that revel in Ranyevskaya’s spontaneous embraces and play banana peel to Yepikhodov’s fearless pratfalls. The ambiguous, complex yet simple presence of these petals speaks volumes about the way Chekhov’s people live in the place they live, because that presence draws its force from them and them alone, and means nothing without them.
